putting down roots in Maine

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I am tired of March. The weather has been properly capricious, with spring advancing, receding, advancing, and disappearing altogether. More than anything, it is the unvarying black and white landscape that is wearing me down. Gray skies, soggy snow, black trees, sleet, ice, fog–all color has been leached away.

We had a couple of days with brilliant blue skies and robin song.

I took a delightful, leisurely walk comparing birch and poplar bark and admiring pussy willows.

This birch bark had Frankenstein-like stitches

This birch’s bark looked like petroglyphs or Roman numerals

Delicate peels

Golden peels

The poplar looks like it’s bursting out of its bark

It seemed as if we might be on the brink of spring.

Poplar

Willow

But another cold front moved in, coating everything in ice.

Ice-coated pussy willows

Pussy willow-cicles

Apple buds

Azaleas

Queen Anne’s Lace

I should be grateful for all this precipitation after last summer’s drought, but I am starved for color and a few flowers.

While we tried to become resigned to out-waiting winter’s siege, we faced a sneak attack on another front. Some wily chipmunk decided to have a vacation under the hood of our car. This was not the first time we have had rodents in our vehicles. It is a hazard of rural life in Maine. We don’t have a garage and our parking area is bounded by stone walls and a wood pile, which provide perfect cover for mice and chipmunks.

We have tried every kind of deterrent, from peppermint oil, to dryer sheets, to fox urine.
Our previous damage, including chewed wires for our car’s moon roof, was from mice. After setting some traps, we thought we had it under control.

The chipmunk was another story. Exactly one week ago, last Wednesday, our car’s heater fan started making an alarming noise. It is still cold and icy here, and we need that heater and defroster to get around. So, I brought the car in immediately and found that some little critter had torn out most of the cabin air filter for nesting material and the filter debris had been sucked into the heater fan. The mechanic cleared out the material and put in a new filter. All good, we thought.

The second destroyed filter. One day’s damage. There were maple seeds and pine needles stashed in it.

Not so. By the next afternoon, same noise. Another trip to the mechanic on Friday, another eaten filter, and this time, there were bits of hood liner added to the mix. Another clean out, another new filter, more smelly deterrents, traps set. The mechanics all surmised that it was a chipmunk, not a mouse, that was the causing the damage.

Hood liner. Lovely, soft nesting material.

Now, I hate to trap a chipmunk. They peg the adorable meter for rodents. Charming, fun to watch–I LOVE chipmunks. But this little rodent was costing us a lot of time and money. We had tried to peacefully coexist, but we cannot provide our car as chipmunk housing.

It burrowed under the hood liner here. Again, one day’s damage.

The traps seemed to work. Not in actually catching anything, but they must have made the chipmunks wary. We saw no signs of them.

Until Monday. A third trip to the mechanic, a third filter destroyed, more hood liner gone. This time the mechanic installed wire screening across the entire opening for the heating ductwork. We have our fingers crossed that it will work. So far, so good. In the meantime, the car smells like a balsam-scented laundromat (we may add mothballs to the mix). We will move our woodpile and stop feeding the birds for a while in hopes that will clear out some of the chipmunks. The war continues.